Monkeys, raccoons and lizards clobbered the planet in 2014, helped by aliens, robots and fairies. It was not quite a terrible year for great films, but they just didn't stand a chance against the killer critters coming out of Hollywood or, to be accurate, out of large warehouses full of computers in Bangalore, Bristol, South Korea, Spain, China, Denmark or wherever the major special-effects houses set up their production facilities.

At least in that sense, the work gets shared around: thousands of worker bees around the world are now employed in the business of turning bad scripts into good money.

I have just spent an hour perusing the box office figures for 2014 and it is a depressing experience, from any angle. Not one of the top-10 movies at the box office, either worldwide or United States domestic, was a real-world story, in the sense of something that reflects the world we actually live in. Every film, on both indices, was a work of fantasy, if we define it widely.

Guardians of the Galaxy, an adventure-comedy about space pirates fighting alien criminals, was the top film at the US box office, but only second on the international list. This was the film with the talking raccoon, and that might be why. What do the rest of us know about raccoons?

Worldwide, the biggest film of the year was Transformers: Age of Extinction, the fourth in a brain-melting series directed by Michael Bay, who brought us Bad Boys, Armageddon and Pain & Gain. What he doesn't know about dumbing down hasn't yet been discovered. Guardians was $US315 million ($387 million) behind, not even close. I realise a lot of children had Transformers toys as kids, but come on – you're making us all suffer.

The next seven films in worldwide box office were Maleficent (with Angelina Jolie as the wicked witch from Cinderella), X-Men: Days of Future Past (a lot of good actors in silly costumes), Captain America: The Winter Soldier(ditto), The Amazing Spiderman 2 (rebooted, recast and regurgitated), Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (rebooted and re-energised, with a talking monkey), Interstellar (space explorers, but a good movie), How to Train Your Dragon 2 (funny animation) and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 (dystopian futurism).

Notice anything about these, apart from the fact that half are remakes and reboots of comic books? Most are about what we might term large-scale terrorist attacks on the free world or the American way of life, or both. The mutant monkeys attack San Francisco, then the rest of the US; the rogue corporation attacks New York City in Spiderman 2; alien robots attack the Earth in Transformers; more robots go bad in X-Men. The giant Japanese nuclear lizard even returned to attack the US in 2014 in Godzilla, which was No.10 in the US and No. 11 globally.

The oddballs here were Captain America: The Winter Soldier, where the threat came from within S.H.I.E.L.D., the CIA-like organisation that Captain America (Chris Evans) rose from the dead to work for; and the third Hunger Games, the story of a young woman fighting a powerful and vicious dictator (Donald Sutherland) – an American dictator, in fact.

In most of the others, the threat was external and non-human. There are some good real-world movies for adults about fighting the Islamist threat, but young audiences worldwide, not just in the US, seem to prefer their threatening villains more metaphorical – alien, mechanical or both. The studios like this too: they can still market the films to the Middle East and not suffer a huge backlash. Pardon my cynicism.

This embrace of fantasy is not new. The only real-world movies in last year's top 10 worldwide were Gravity and Fast & Furious 6, both of which were closer to fantasy than reality. It has been growing since at least 2001, when the Harry Potter series and the Lord of the Rings trilogy kicked off. Those two series set us on the path to where we are now – up Fantasy Creek without a paddle. It's not that I hate fantasy, far from it, but not all the time. I like pineapple too, but who wants a supermarket full of the stuff?

What else happened in 2001? The attacks on the World Trade Centre on September 11 occurred too late to have a major influence on that year's box office, but they have certainly influenced every year since. The flight to fantasy would have happened anyway, because Harry Potter and the battling hobbits made so much money, but I don't know if it would have lasted as long without the waves of fear and loathing that followed 9/11.

The rise of computer-generated imagery didn't start with those movies, but they showed what could be done, and Peter Jackson's films started a drive towards mediaevalism that is still with us, in television series such as Game of Thrones. Jackson was prescient: mediaeval thinking fitted the times, unfortunately. Cutting off heads has become far too familiar now.

The Australian box office was at least more cheerful. Our favourite film this year was The Lego Movie, made largely within our shores, at Animal Logic. It made $US2.9 million more than Transformers, which gladdens my heart. And there were four movies from the real world in our top 10: Gone Girl, The Wolf of Wall Street, 22 Jump Street and The Other Woman – not just pineapples, in other words. Let us hope the New Year brings many flavours. Pineapples are not the only fruit.

Twitter: @ptbyrnes